Spotfire® Tips & Tricks: Transformation Groups

Is there a technical difference in how Transformations are grouped? There is a usability difference in that you are able to step through data previews when transformations are split up but are there any tradeoffs?

The answer is that there are differences, but you may not notice them until data gets fairly large:

• Each group produces intermediate result data. The more groups, the more memory is consumed. The benefit is as stated above that you can step through this data as previews.
• If you have multiple transformations in one group, Spotfire tries to optimize their execution by combining them into a single query to the Spotfire in-memory data engine.

It's also good to know that if you add transformations to the data source itself, when the analysis is saved with Stored data, only the result set after transformations have been executed will be stored. This could save Library space when transformations reduce the data size.